Philip De Lancaster on the contrary believed all things, and examined none: he was a man of great faith and few words; by no means wanting in curiosity, but extremely averse from enquiry and trouble. Being an only son and heir to the wealthy house of De Lancaster, it was thought adviseable by the fathers on each side, who were the contracting parties, that he should take to wife Matilda, only child of old Morgan of Glen-Morgan, and presumptive heiress to his fortune and estate. Philip, who had shewn no ardour as a lover, was by no means remarkably uxorious as a husband; and Matilda did not molest him with her fondness or attentions: They lived in the same house as appurtenances to the family at Kray Castle, (for such from time immemorial had been the custom of the De Lancasters) and they lived without quarrelling; for they were very little together; their passions were never roused by contradiction, or enflamed by jealousy; the husband had no attachments, and the wife, who was said to have been thwarted in her first love, laid herself out for no future admirers. These few preliminary remarks may probably account for the placidity, with which Philip now sate down in the library between his father and the colonel to wait the issue of an event, in which if he did not manifest a very lively interest, the reason very probably was, because he did not feel it. Philip, (if his sage remark is in the recollection of the reader) had risqued a truism, when he modestly suggested that it was a troublesome task to write a book. Philip did not speak this from his own experience; therefore it is, that I call his truism a risque, for it was not always that his father gave his passport to assertions of that character; but the learned gentleman’s thoughts were just then employed not upon the trouble, that we take when we bring our works into the world, but the trouble, which we give, when we ourselves are brought into it, and upon this topic he began to descant, as follows. The unlucky accident, by which my blundering neighbour has precipitated Mrs. De Lancaster into labour-pains, must in all probability tend to aggravate and enhance those sorrows, in which by the condition of her sex she is destined to bring forth; and indeed, independent of that accident, I should not wonder if the pains she suffers, and the screams she utters, were more than ordinarily acute and piercing, planted as she now is, by adoption into my family, in the very stream and current from the fountain head of the primæval curse-- Whereabouts are we now, said the colonel within himself?